From the Magazine

South Pacific, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Show that Re-Wrote the Rules of Race on Broadway

After experiencing their first flop, the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein sat down to adapt a new novel for the stage. The outcome was a musical with a frank treatment of racial prejudice—and songs that brought down the house.

“Those fellows are so mad,” James Michener would remember thinking about Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. “They could make a great musical out of three pages of the Bronx telephone directory.” Rodgers and Hammerstein, the most successful songwriting team on Broadway, were angry because they’d just had their first flop, Allegro. What they had in front of them now was Michener’s first book. Tales of the South Pacific was a neither-fish-nor-fowl creation—not a standard novel with a beginning, middle, and end, but rather an accumulation of atmospheric character sketches. The New York Times had pronounced it “truly one of the most remarkable books” to come out of World War II, and its appeal lay in its granularity—in its depiction of American types interacting with South Sea Island originals—more than in its inherent drama.

Michener’s wartime service in the Pacific had left him with a notebook full of vivid impressions and memorable characters. But Oscar Hammerstein would somehow have to distill it all into a coherent libretto that could hold an audience for two and a half hours. There was no shortage of color.

“I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific,” Michener’s book begins, in an evocative passage that Oscar underlined in his personal copy.

The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of
coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the
ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons,
lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating
jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting.
The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting. But whenever I start to
talk about the South Pacific, people intervene. I try to tell somebody
what the steaming Hebrides were like and first thing you know I’m
telling about the old Tonkinese woman who used to sell human heads. As
souvenirs. For fifty dollars!

Indeed, it is just such a woman, “Bloody Mary”—a wily, betel-nut-chewing entrepreneur and master of pidgin G.I. slang—who features prominently in “Fo’ Dolla,” the longest story in the book. Making the acquaintance of handsome, young Lieutenant Joe Cable, she spirits him to the nearby island of Bali-ha’i, where the French planters have sequestered their daughters for the war, and where he promptly falls for Mary’s own lovely daughter, Liat. With Mary playing an uncomfortable combination of matchmaker and procurer, Cable is drawn again and again to the mystic island. But despite his deep love for the girl, he knows he can never marry her or take her home to his family in Philadelphia. Bloody Mary’s response as Cable heads off to duty in “Operation Alligator,” a major assault on a Japanese-held island, is unsparing, “Lieutenant one bullshit goddam fool!”

Martin as Nellie Forbush.

From Photofest.

Michener summons up a gallery of other compelling characters. There is Tony Fry, a swashbuckling American officer with a penchant for acting outside the regular chain of command. He figures in “The Cave,” one of the most dramatic stories in the collection, about a group of soldiers stationed on a small island, who are trying to keep the Japanese from retaking Guadalcanal. There is Lieutenant Bus Adams, an American bomber pilot who is shot down and whose rescue mission costs the American taxpayers $600,000—”but it’s worth every cent of the money,” Michener’s narrator notes, “if you happen to be that pilot.” There is Luther Billis, a tanned, tattooed Seabee from the navy’s construction battalion, who is obsessed with a ritual ceremony on a neighboring island involving a native boar’s tooth. There is Ensign Bill Harbison, a snappy, ambitious, married officer from Albuquerque who takes a shine to a navy nurse from Arkansas, Nellie Forbush, loses his head and tries to rape her.

And finally there is Emile De Becque, a middle-aged French plantation owner, who falls in love with Forbush and asks her to marry him, in a story called “Our Heroine.” Nellie agrees, until she learns that De Becque has eight mixed-race daughters with four different mothers, two Javanese, one Tonkinese, and one Polynesian. But in the end, Nellie overcomes her fears and prejudices, returns to Emile, and joins his daughters in singing “Au Clair de la Lune.”

It was a lot for a librettist to absorb, and with his usual meticulous attention to detail and his strong eye for plot and character, Hammerstein went through Michener’s book, story by story, underlining bits of dialogue, making red grease-pencil check marks in the margins, suggesting at one point that Cable, who in the book never meets Nellie Forbush, could have a scene telling her all about Bloody Mary’s improbable proposal. On a sheet of yellow legal paper, with page numbers from Michener’s book running down the left margin, he made notes of the characters’ names. Hammerstein’s work gained added impetus—and the whole project got a big shot in the arm—on April 27, 1948, with the surprise news that Tales of the South Pacific had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

For Hammerstein, part of the strong appeal of Michener’s book was its frank treatment of racial prejudice, which was anything but a theoretical issue for his own family. Rodgers and Hammerstein had already re-invented the Broadway musical with their pioneering Oklahoma! and Carousel, which integrated dance, story, and song as never before in the service of realistic drama. Now they were dealing head-on with a ripped-from-the-headlines subject that confronted the social changes and tensions sweeping America. Oscar’s wife, Dorothy, had a sister named Eleanor, nicknamed “Doodie,” who was married to Jerry Watanabe, the son of a British woman—whose father had once been an ambassador to Japan—and a Japanese man who was a director of the industrial-trading firm Mitsui and Company. Jerry had been raised to be the very model of a proper Englishman, educated at Cambridge, and was a fine tennis player and golfer. When the United States entered World War II, in 1941, he was working in the New York offices of Mitsui and, as a Japanese national, was interned at Ellis Island. Even after he was released, he could not find work, so Dorothy hired him to manage the accounts of her interior-decorating business. During Jerry’s internment, Doodie and their daughter, Jennifer, lived for a time with the Hammersteins at their farm, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and when Dorothy and her sister took the girl to be enrolled at the local school, they asked the principal for assurances that she would not face discrimination. “She’ll have to pay the price for her antecedents,” the man answered, and Jennifer went instead to a local Quaker school and then to the George School, in Newtown, Pennsylvania (which the Hammersteins’ son Jimmy also attended, along with a young family friend named Stephen Sondheim).

Hammerstein went through James Michener’s book, underlining bits of
dialogue.

Hammerstein made a particular point of combating prejudice. He had volunteered his time for the Writers’ War Board, a privately organized group that worked in close coordination with a raft of government agencies to promote the Allied cause and combat racism and anti-Semitism on the home front. Hammerstein had never been one who could say no to what he saw as a good cause, and was one of the entertainment world’s most stalwart liberal voices. Among his other pursuits: working to end segregation in baseball.

In 1949, Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein joined James Michener and another Pennsylvania neighbor, the author Pearl S. Buck, in helping to create Welcome House, the country’s first inter-racial, international adoption agency, begun with the particular mission of placing Amerasian children—many of them the offspring of broken wartime romances—in American homes.

For their part, Dick Rodgers and his wife, also named Dorothy, were well aware that no amount of artistic success could enable them or their two teenage daughters to crack the elite social clubs, resorts, and cotillions that barred Jews from membership. South Pacific would be a not-so-quiet statement of protest, but it’s hard to remember just how forward-leaning the subject matter was in any context at the time, much less as the spine of a Broadway musical. Segregation was still a fact of life not only in the Jim Crow South but in much of the urban North as well. It had been only two years earlier that Jackie Robinson broke major-league baseball’s color line. In the draft of the South Pacific script that Hammerstein and Joshua Logan, the show’s director and co-author, completed in time for the first cast rehearsal, there is a bit of dialogue that would be dropped before the first performance. After Nellie has broken off her relationship with Emile in horror at his mixed-race children, and Cable finds himself unable to marry Liat, despite his love for her, the young Americans share their feelings:

“Damn it to hell!,” Cable shouts to Nellie. “Why? Why do you look so damned shocked? What’s the difference if her hair is blonde and curly or black and straight? If I want her to be my wife, why can’t I have her?”

“They do,” Cable answers in disgust. “And then everybody does their damndest to prove it. A hell of a chance Liat and I would have in one of those little gray stone and timber houses on the Main Line. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Cable entertained, last Tuesday, with a house-warming. Nobody came!’”

Martin posing with cast members, 1949.

By Phillip Harrington/Look Magazine Photograph Collection/Museum of The City of New York/Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division; digital colorization by Impact Digital.

The dialogue may have sounded too raw to survive. But the song that followed it remained in place, the song Cable sings in response to Nellie’s assertion that her prejudice is “something that is born in me!” and Emile’s insistence that it cannot have been. Indeed, Joe explains, “it happens after you’re born”:

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught from year to year,

It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a different shade—

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate—

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

In Oscar’s original draft, Emile, who was played by the great opera basso Ezio Pinza, continues the song, declaring, “Love is quite different. It grows by itself,” and then singing:

It will grow like a weed

On a mountain of stones;

You don’t have to feed

Or put fat on its bones;

It can live on a smile

Or a note of a song;

It may starve for a while,

But it stumbles along,

Stumbles along with its banner unfurled,

The joy and the beauty, the hope of

the world. . . .

Rodgers rejected the last verses as unnecessary but stood in lockstep behind the song.

The New Haven opening was set for Monday, March 7, 1949. From Williams College, where he was an undergraduate, Stephen Sondheim sent a cheeky telegram of congratulations, asking, “Do you need a good baritone?” But Josh Logan, whose emotions could veer wildly from exultation to despair, was on edge. On Hotel Taft stationery, he scrawled a note to Hammerstein. “Thank you for the show [and] the fine time I had working with you—and the credit sharing and all the boosts and gooses,” he wrote. “For God’s sake don’t let’s make too quick decisions tomorrow night.” Referring to the group of lawyers, investors, agents, and other kibitzers who were in town for the opening, he went on: “I will fix anything”—underlined twice—“in this show—toward the happiness of all three of us but I cannot give full satisfaction” to all the other would-be critics.

As if validating his qualms, Logan watched that evening’s performance with growing trepidation. First, the star Mary Martin’s big comic number, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right outa My Hair,” which he’d felt sure would be a smash, landed with a fizzle. Then “A Wonderful Guy,” sung by Nellie and a bunch of nurses, also seemed to fall flat.

Tickets to South Pacific immediately became all but unobtainable, and
scalping was rife.

The next night, when “Wash That Man” and “Wonderful Guy” produced the same underwhelming reaction, Logan was again puzzled, until his friend Molly Williams, whose actor-playwright husband, Emlyn, had come to New Haven to help trim the show’s running time, confessed that she had not heard “Wash That Man” at all, because the audience was all abuzz, talking to one another and wondering whether Martin was really washing her hair (she was, eight times a week). Logan’s solution was easy: Have Mary sing one full chorus of the song, to put over the lyrics, and then get out the shampoo. It took him about 10 days, with the show in Boston, to solve the riddle of “Wonderful Guy.” He thought the problem might be that Nellie was confessing her innermost thoughts to her fellow nurses, spoiling an intimate moment. “Too bad the song can’t be a soliloquy,” Logan mused to Hammerstein, who promptly agreed, and switched the pronouns in the song from “you” to “they.” “That night she tore the house apart,” Logan would recall.

There were a few other changes. On March 9, Hammerstein’s old friend Essie Robeson, the wife of Paul Robeson, wrote to wonder why Archie Savage, the sole black dancer in the show, and a spectacular one at that, was always jitterbugging. “It is very possible that I am unduly sensitive, racially, but so are a lot of us, and it would help enormously that if just once he appeared with his comrades NOT cutting up.” Oscar immediately replied, “Since you have seen the play, and before I received your letter, we have inserted an episode in which Archie Savage is not jitterbugging.”

Hammerstein was less sympathetic to Lieutenant Commander Thomas McWhorter, of the navy, who fired off an early broadside against the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” asking that it be cut. “It is like drinking a scotch and soda and suddenly swallowing the ice cube!” McWhorter wrote. “You could not have interrupted the beautiful flow of entertainment any more effectively had you stopped the show for a VD lecture.” Oscar wrote back, “I believe I get the point of your letter very clearly, and I realize very well the dangers of overstating the case. But I just feel that the case is not fully stated without this song. I wish it were true that all these things are accepted by the public. You say, ‘the theme is wearing very thin,’ but in spite of this, I see progress being made only very slowly.”

The show opened in Boston on Tuesday, March 15, and Rodgers and Hammerstein could have written the reviews themselves. Don Fellows, a young member of the cast, would recall knowing that the company had something special in hand when ticketless theatergoers outside the Shubert began offering cast members $100 for a pair.

The New York opening was set for Thursday, April 7, 1949. Hammerstein and Rodgers were confident enough of the critics’ verdict that they abandoned theatrical superstition and booked their own opening-night party, an elegant supper dance at the St. Regis Roof, and ordered a couple of hundred copies of The New York Times to pass out to their guests. They had not miscalculated: the critics offered raves all around. Brooks Atkinson in the Times called the play “a magnificent musical drama,” Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Post found the show “an utterly captivating work of theatrical art,” and Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune pronounced it “a show of rare enchantment.”

Predictably, “Carefully Taught” came in for its share of criticism, with John Mason Brown of Saturday Review complaining that it smacked of “dragged-in didacticism,” while The New Yorker found it “just a little embarrassing.” But Rodgers and Hammerstein’s theatrical peers and colleagues were ecstatic. In a note to Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein, Helen Hayes wrote, “Words won’t do it—flowers failed to say it—there’s just no way to express the gratitude I felt for last Thursday night. And for the many other wonderful times you’ve given me with your talent. I’m just humbly thankful to be living in the same period with you. ‘South Pacific’ tops everything you’ve ever done.” For his part, James Michener paraphrased Lord Byron’s famous response to the success of his poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “I went to bed an unknown and woke to find Ezio Pinza famous.”

Tickets immediately became all but unobtainable, and scalping was rife. Each morning at seven o’clock, a line formed at the box office for the 30 standing-room seats available for that evening’s performance. Souvenir shops printed fake ticket stubs so that those not lucky enough to get real ones could leave them casually on their coffee tables as if they had seen the show. The demand was so intense that Michener himself stood in the wings, and as late as September 1951 would tell the columnists Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg that he had seen it only once from out front.

Even more than Oklahoma!,South Pacific became a huge cultural and social phenomenon. Virtually every American adult had some palpable connection to World War II, which meant that they also had a natural connection to the show. If Oklahoma! had satisfied wartime America’s longing for a simpler time and Carousel had tapped into the returning servicemen’s familiarity with death, South Pacific offered a dramatization of a conflict that was still visceral for millions. In the spring of 1950, the show swept every major category at the fourth annual Tony Awards, and on May 1 came the crowning honor: South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.